Sunday, February 7, 2010

Churning is what you do with butter...and not much else

I've been loving this quote by Therese Macdonald:

"It's not about churning out curriculum. It's about your child's learning."

I just love that quote! I've been musing it over and over the last few days. I am not interested in my kids finishing a page of a book. I'm interested in their ability to learn, to adapt to new situations and to think through things logically and sequentially.

Something interesting happened to me while I was at work on Saturday. I was with a co-worker, a girl who is in her first year of university. She enjoys hearing me talk about homeschooling and what I did with my kids in the past week. We started talking about math and how much she did not like it. Then--shocker--she told me that she never learned how to write out long division.

True story.

So I grabbed a pen and paper and we got down to writing out proofs for long division. I showed her step by step how to do it and she caught on so fast.

But here's the thing...

She went through her academic life not knowing how to do this skill! She said that her 'not learning it' was treated as "you didn't pass this test. Oh well, we're moving on to a new subject."

I was shocked and appalled that she had gone seven years from the introduction of a concept until now before actually learning how to do it.

It made me think about what Therese said, "It's not about churning out curriculum. It's about your child's learning."